Tags: prodeo

So, we did what Hitchens and Bone and all those people thought was the right thing to do, and we went into Afghanistan and we bombed it from the air and we killed all those people, including noncombatants, and we effected regime change.

Whenever we invade these countries and cause such immense suffering it’s always supposed to be about the womens’ situation. Because our invasion and our “peacekeeping” will fix it. And if feminists oppose doing this, or are “silent”, they’re demonstrating their lack of real commitment to the cause of womens’ liberation.

Explain to me again why eleven of our young people have died putting this man into power and keeping him there?

This will only be of interest if you’re a regular at Larvatus Prodeo. Pass it on.

From Mark Bahnisch:

We’ve had major problems over the last few days with a spam attack of unprecedented size, which has rendered LP almost unusable due to constant database errors. We’ll be upgrading and moving to a new host over the weekend (at which point we’ll disappear altogether for a few days).

Basically, the increased traffic we’ve had since the election began (up by about a third on normal) has made us a more attractive target to spammers.

In the meantime, we’ve found turning comments off keeps the site working as the spammers posting comments is the cause of too many database connections open at once – hence the outages. We’ve picked the new host for greater reliability as well as more bandwidth.

In the meantime, we’ve set up a backup blog – LP in Exile – where we’ll be crossposting and where comments can be posted:

http://larvatusprodeo.wordpress.com/

We’re also appealing for donations to assist with costs involved in the move:

http://larvatusprodeo.net/2007/11/06/blog-issues/

We’d be very grateful if you could post about this, or disseminate it in other ways to other friends of LP.

Please bear with us during this time of transition, and we hope we’ll be back all shiny and new next week.

Now as the new laws are about to take effect, the message appears to have changed to “ha, ha, sucked in badly”, just as I’d feared. The management at a car parts factory in Clayton have gleefully begun cutting their workers wages and conditions.

ACTU secretary Greg Combet and Australian Manufacturing Workers Union secretary Doug Cameron addressed a stopwork meeting of more than 200 Dana employees outside the company’s Clayton plant yesterday, over what they say are Dana’s plans to drastically cut workers’ wages and conditions.

The company’s enterprise bargaining demands, put to the union this month, are for a 5 per cent drop in pay for current workers, 20 per cent pay cut for new workers, removal of rostered days off and restrictions on sick day and overtime entitlements.

20 per cent!? This went far beyond anything I expected, and I thought I was a pessimist.

Despite his unbelievable demands, and the fact that the company made he still made a net profit of $25 million last year, the Dana boss, Bob Day, still described the stopwork meeting as a “grandstanding publicity stunt”. That’s chutzpah.

Mr Day said Dana had not asked employees to work for $1 an hour as in China or India.

But he had his fingers crossed behind his back when he said that, since his next utterance was:

“We’re trying to invest in technology and (remove) some of the manacles and shackles that people like the AMWU place on you so that you can achieve productivity that’s achievable in other parts of the world.”

“Other parts of the world” is a bit of a giveaway.

I was halfway through this post when I clicked on Larvatus Prodeo and found out that Qantas, too, is trying to cut its workers pay and conditions.

It’s well deserved, David. “The Richard Attenborough of blogging but with much more attitude and without a large bureacracy telling you not to go there.” And a lot less pompous, I should add. Your votes, unlike those for some other nominees, weren’t the result of any stupid orchestrated campaign (they know who they are.)

Best West Australian blog had to be Red Rag. Yes, it’s gone now, but it was appropriate to honour this completely kick-ass (and useful) blog. As the new IR laws kick in this year, we’ll really miss it.

Best Overseas blog went to RTS (Two gongs!) which isn’t overseas any more. Still, I guess it was for most of last year. And the runner-up? I’m sorry, but would WNP (which should have won, I reckon) ever start a post with stuff like “Today’s been such a cruisy day”?

Mandatory disclaimer – it should be abundantly obvious, if you’ve checked out the links to Collective Apathy, that these Awards are regularly and joyfully gerrymandered. But the bloggers I’ve linked to are truly hot poop. If there are any you haven’t visited before, check ’em out.

Hello, balcony dwellers, I’m back. I’ve been having a bit of a hiatus and reading all the interesting blogs out there, and even actual books!

Cast Iron Balcony seemed to bumble along in a minor way in 2005- a wee microbe in the blog ecosystem. But Media 2 – that’s the domain which incorporates Barista and Cast Iron Balcony – didn’t do too badly. In his December 30 post, Least Unpopular Australian Leftoid Blogs (Shucks! Such praise!) Tim Blair points out the Alexa.com traffic rankings for leftie blogs in… well, for once I’m completely in agreement with Tim in that I haven’t the faintest what the numbers refer to, except that in relative terms we are doing OK:

1. Tim Lambert: 122,559

2. Troppo Armadillo: 131,292

3. Larvatus Prodeo and Rob Corr: 211,441 (Note: the daily ranking at LP’s new site is 159,263)

4. Catallaxy Files: 225,663

5. John Quiggin: 320,092

6. David Tiley and Cast Iron Balcony: 382,880

7. Gary Sauer-Thompson: 388,696

8. Singing Bridges (Australia’s best blog): 595,755

9. Tim Dunlop: 708,228 (Note: Dunlop’s daily ranking is 266,229, which may be more representative)

10. Daily Flute: 825,427

This means that (a) my stats are better than my site counter would make out or, more likely, (b) that Barista is blogging a blue streak and I’m enjoying a ride out of obscurity on his fabulouous coattails.